Saturday, August 16, 2008

UMD carrying case/pouch review

It's really nice looking soft case with lots of little stylish touches, but I was disappointed by the UMD holder sleeves inside.

This is one of 2 recent UMD cases that are "officially" licensed by Sony, they showed up at my local Toys R Us just before xmas.

It's a clamshell design; it unzips to reveal plastic UMD sleeves inside. The body of the case is a nylon material similar to camera cases. It's somewhat stiff, but still soft... you wouldn't want to have this case squished under a ton of textbooks or anything heavy like that.

On the outside, the PSP logo & Playstation logo are prominent & look very cool. The PS logo is even on the zipper handles! Nice. There's a carabiner clip for hooking it to a bag or a belt.

On the back is another zipper pocket, it looks like see-through mesh, but it isn't. It's a nice pocket, but very small... you could probably only fit 2 memory stick pro duos. Not your headphones, maybe even not a cleaning cloth.

Inside, there are 4 plastic sleeves that hold a UMD on each side (holds in total 8 UMDs) this is the weakest part of the case. The plastic sleeves are really thin & flimsy. The backing of the sleeve is this coarse paper-like material that looks & feels like a Bounce dryer cloth (only without the waxy feel of course) it's pretty much the same type of material used in cheap CD holder sleeves. I was really hoping for an acordian-like set of pockets for the UMDs.

Because the sleeves are so thin, they don't offer any kind of cushion between UMDs. So when you're flipping through your discs, it's easy to have them slap against each other. UMDs aren't exactly the most durable things, so you don't really want that.